Too often companies consider their website as an after-thought. They try and bolt on their website to their existing marketing as a separate entity. But then they get disgruntled when the web site is not the success they hoped for

The reason the website does not perform to expectations is often because of a lack of planning. And there are tough questions that they may not have answers for right away.

This article will explain some of the reasons why identifying and documenting your business objectives at the beginning of any website design/re-design project is essential. It will also explore some of the more common examples as case scenarios.

Start with Why. Why do you have a website in the first place?

Often the answer is “Because everyone does” or “We need to be found on Google.”

If the answer to why you want a website is not as sexy, or even professional, as you think it should be, get it down on paper anyway. Then ask why again, and again, and again.

For example, a common reason to want a website is to be found on Google. Why is this important?

• So you can have more leads.

Why do you want more leads?

• Because we want to be more selective about the work we take on

Why do you want to be more selective about the work we take on?

• Because we are sick of dealing with low budget projects.

Why?

• Because we want to do more meaningful and exciting work and make a difference.

So we can see here that what started as wanting to be found on Google ended up a much clearer picture of the heart of the business.

This is a simplified example and you may have a number of business objectives. Those objectives may include: increasing profits, getting better clients, getting better projects, growing to a size you can employ more people, or scaling down so you can work less but with the same level of profit.

Whatever these objectives are they are critical to be written down on paper and exposed to the light of day.

You don’t know what you don’t know

If you can get down exactly what you do know then you can start a dialogue with others that may have some insights that you don’t.

For example, going back to our “wanting to be found on Google” objective, the reality is that ranking high on organic search results (the results you don’t pay Google for) for competitive keywords is a huge project. It requires a large budget and a long time to get results.

In this example we are putting the solution of being found on Google before the problem of needing more sales. The objective is to get higher profits, better clients, better projects, etc. Unless there is a vanity objective for ranking high on Google search, who cares where you rank on Google? The important thing is you achieve your sales objectives.

And there may be a multitude of other ways to achieve these objectives that will bring a much quicker return on investment. But until you get your objectives documented in a website strategy no one is capable to fully assist you with their expertise.

You don’t need all the answers

Documenting your business objectives does not require you to have all the answers on how to achieve them. In fact it would be useful to pretend (just for a few minutes) that you don’t have all the answers.

What business objectives do you “suspect” could be solved by a website strategy?

What are your business objectives that you don’t think can be solved by a website strategy? (You might be surprised)

What specific reasons do you have for owning a website?

Getting back to why you want a website in the first place, I will throw a few brainstorming ideas out there for you.

• A place to refer clients to view your portfolio
• Generate leads
• Actively convert sales
• Build an audience
• Show your expertise in a specific niche
• Documentation resource for current clients
• Documentation resource for potential clients
• Guide potential clients through a sales funnel.

What would life look like if you didn’t have a website?

For some, they might not be able to imagine life without a website. It is crucial to their business model. For others a website may be “nice to have”. If you have a small niche and/or specialise in large contracts that are mostly by referral from the same sources then a website might not be for you. In any case, it is worth the question, if for nothing else but to rate the importance of a website to your company. This importance should be proportional to the investment you make on your website strategy.

What % of leads are generated from your website?

What % of income is generated from the site?

Your answers are more than likely based on a guess. None the less it is still important to get you thinking of the value of your website to your company.

Important is the difference between % of leads and % of revenue. If they are markedly different it is worth looking at why. Say you have 50% of your leads come from your website, but only 25% of revenue then this reflects a low conversion rate. We need to address how the branding and positioning are failing so as to produce low quality leads.

If improvements were made to your website, what increase in these percentages could you expect?

If you have identified a number of holes in your strategy then you may feel there is room for improvement. This is only a guess on your behalf, but it’s an educated guess based on your intimate knowledge of your business and target market.

What does a successful website look like to you?

Previously I said you only had to pretend you didn’t have all the answers for a few minutes. Well that time is up and you can go back to what you think is possible and reasonable. Just keep in mind you may be off the mark in a few areas.

What % of income is generated from the site?

Compare yourself to a home owner designing their dream home. They have a lot of information about their lifestyle and needs and may be well researched in the architecture they are interested in. Their input is invaluable but will not always be technically correct and an architect will be able to steer them to achieve their goals.

Imagine you are this client and express your needs clearly, and with an open mind. Your input will be an invaluable resource to the web professional that sees it.

Some scenarios to get you thinking

Do you just want a simple brochure website that simply presents your business in a professional and accurate way? There is nothing wrong with that, but it’s important to make this clear from the beginning. There is no use investing in functionality that you will never use.

Or do you want something that acts as an informational resource that you can refer clients to? If so, do you have these resources ready to go? If not they are going to take time or money to create, and probably both. Do you have the budget for this and what sort of resources would your leads and customers find interesting and useful?

Do you want to go one step further and engage in a dialogue that your website is the hub for creating interesting blog posts that your target market will comment on and generate a series of conversations?

Or do you want to go all out and follow the media approach, where your company becomes a media producer. This has been very successful for a number of companies, most famously Gary Vaynerchuk from Wine Libraries TV.

I hope I have given you enough ideas without overwhelming you. All this is in vain if you don’t take action and dedicate 10 minutes to identifying the top 3 business objectives for your site.

I am a business owner first, and although I have been building websites since 2000 I had also been a hacker. Get a business idea, quickly build it myself, and get it in front of my market.

If I got a bit of traction and some sales I would upgrade certain parts. I had some friends that were designers and got their input. I was able to keep everything together with rubber bands and build a solid enough business.

“Some” of what I considered to be a lack of professionalism, or at least cowboy methods, I now see promoted as Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and Agile Design

Traditional Web Design Workflows and Where They Failed Me.

In 2009 I discovered Elance and thought all my problems were solved. “Designers for $10 per hour, now I can afford some real designers!” I contracted this Indian girl and approved her for 10 hours to redesign the home page of a site I was managing.

She eagerly got to work and presented me with a link to a webpage, as I went to browse the web page none of the links worked. I then realised that it wasn’t really a web page, but just one big image in a browser. This is odd I thought, “Why go through all that work of creating a mock up website in photoshop that was just going to be copied in html and css, etc?”

I then came to realise that this was the best practice design process, and I figured, “well if that’s what smarter minds than me have decided that is the best way, then who am I to argue”.

I decided to try and embrace this design process, and I must admit it had some real benefits. I was familiar with photoshop, so I was able to get the source doc off her (psd). I was able to take a much more granular look at the design than I was used to after working directly in the browser all those years.

Still not convinced it was the most efficient method duplicating it in 2 file formats; I did recognise that design process was less inhibited by the technical restrictions of html and css. Build it in Photoshop the way you wanted and worry about how you will get it to work in the browser later. I approved the psd with a few changes and she created the html version for me and delivered for a successful project.

Iterative Design is Human Nature

I then changed my mind a week later and hacked the html and css to the way I wanted it. You see it took me a week to digest and for my own internal design process to take shape. There were usability and business case issues that I wasn’t able to conceive when the design was just an image.

I lacked the conceptual thinking necessary to visualize all the elements that were necessary for this design process. It was in part my lack of design experience, but I had managed this site for a long time. And I was more familiar, and understood the business and its’ customers more than anyone.

My product knowledge came from years of working in the trenches in this business. So no matter how experienced in design any contractor was they were not going to be able to have the same insights into that business that I could.

And if I weren’t able to list all the elements needed then and there in the initial mock up stage, I’ll have to add it later into the html and css, or do the whole process again of psd -> html. Etc.

I Don’t Think it Was Because I am an Idiot

I consider myself intelligent and a good strategist. So if I wasn’t able to conceptualise what the website needed to offer it’s audience in one sitting then it’s highly likely that most business owners will have the same issue. The point is, solutions don’t come from a one-hour meeting, they take time to develop.

This is only talking about what we know. The solutions that we don’t yet know, that we need to test and record the behaviour of our users, is even larger in scope and complexity.

At the time, around 2009, I didn’t recognise this yet and just believed it was my lack of experience. And I didn’t feel I was in a position to challenge the accepted best practice.

Off the Shelf Themes vs Waterfall Custom Design.

A couple of years later we decided it was time to upscale the platform on my site GardenWare.com.au and chose the ecommerce platform Magento. I bought a premium (paid) theme and customised it to my brand. Before long the complexities of Magento made me reach out to a developer. Finding a reliable Magento developer in my price range is a whole blog post on it’s own. Suffice to say after 6 long months I finally found Arif from India that I could both afford and work with.

The process of customising the new theme was pretty disorganised and I micromanaged the whole thing without enough knowledge to do so. If I wanted to change something I would contract a freelance designer, or often a couple to do the same task. I could then pick which one I liked best (the joys of Elance pricing) and then pass to Arif and get him to implement. Despite my unstructured approach the project was a success and achieved all the goals we wanted within budget.

A More Professional Approach

It was time to re-build my other site. I had recognised how far my process was from the industry standard and thought I should try and behave a bit more like a professional. There were also a number of issues and bugs we had to overcome using the pre-built theme, and the project manager from Arif’s firm suggested I build this new site from scratch using their process which I agreed to.

As expected I was presented with some mock up images for approval, which looked fine to me. Once I approved, they said they would pass it onto their html expert to convert the image into a static html and css file. It would then be passed on to my developer Arif to integrate into the Magento Content Management System (CMS) we were using.

I was a little bit sceptical at all these steps, but soon found out that this was the industry standard “waterfall” approach. And it was the way grownups must do it.

Or was it?

I was happy enough with the end design, but it went over budget and a lot of the original design was scrapped. It had to be redone either in the browser or if more complex changes were needed, we updated the original psd and then integrated into the site.

What I found was that when I just gave Arif a quick mockup or even just explained what I wanted, he was able to integrate straight into the site without any help from the photoshop or the html expert cutting the process down by half.

I was starting to think these industry best practices were great. Great at creating more jobs for agencies and larger bills for clients. It was then I started to research and find a lot of information on “agile design process” and of course read “The Lean Startup”

When I started my own agency, I decided to make it my mission to create a design process that was organised and professional in approach. But also reduce the waste I saw in the “waterfall method”.

I wanted to create a design process that was more in tune with human nature and embraced the iterative and constant improvement nature in humans. A design process that made allowances for business owners not being able to conceptualise the entire process in the first round of revisions.

You can see this in a case study on how we carried this out in practice http://www.nickj.co/redesign-iotagarden/

Custom vs premium themes is a hotly debated topic and my opinion is a little bit heretical within the upper echelons of the web design community. I am a big fan of premium pre built themes.

In my own experience on using both custom and premium pre built themes, I felt that while there were some issue with the pre-built themes, there was nowhere near as many with the custom themes. And the cost of customising the pre-built themes was also much less.

I believe there are business cases for custom themes, but would be hesitant for projects under $50k. Certain brands need uniqueness and Nike’s invention of parallax scrolling created a lot of buzz in the industry. But they had the budget for this design differentiation. I can also see a business case for SAAS platforms or websites where the website is the business. We use Saasu for our accounting and mailchimp for newsletters, to name just 2, and I can see that they need more granular control and a custom solution.

Adroll.com is an example of a business case for a custom site where it is very interactive and you need to be able to create ads for Facebook. I challenge this and find Adroll infuriating to use. It presents a whole new learning curve just to do some simple tasks. If the Adroll interface was almost identical to Adwords, which I am already familiar with, I would be much happier. Even if the Adroll interface was better than Adwords, it’s still an extra thing to learn.

How many customers gave up that would have been able to achieve their campaign if the interface had been more like Adwords, which they were already familiar with?

I’m not suggesting Adroll use a premium theme. What I suggest is that they don’t try and re-invent the wheel and replicate as close to possible the advertising platform that most people are familiar with, i.eAdwords.

Better Ways to Differentiate than Through Custom Themes

For most businesses, there are so many ways to differentiate their business such as service or product offer, guarantee, customer service, ethical or environmental position, quality, price etc. etc.

Web design, while crucial to convey how the business differentiates itself, is way down on the list to the extent that a custom design is required.

Should all website look the same? Maybe. As a web user, it would make my life a lot easier if sites were more standard and similar.

On the other side of the coin I do appreciate good design, but not the bold changes. It’s the subtle differences that make my life easier. It’s the clever combination of nice and easy-to-read fonts, the correct use of white space that guides my eye to the next chunk of information, the intricate mathematics of the spacing between elements, and the size of those elements and relationship to each other.

In good, pre-built themes at least half of this is already done and they are generic enough that the user is not left thinking. “This is pretty, but how the hell do I get what I want done and get out of here?”

Perhaps the most important thing for the brand is the emotional response the user has to the website design and if that is in harmony with the way they perceive the brand. Again, some clever design on top of an existing framework (theme) instead of a complete custom will achieve this goal.

The website is the vehicle not the offer.

Imagine how ridiculous it would be if a sales manager said he needed custom cars for his sales force to differentiate the brand. That he proposed to go to one of the car manufactures and get a quote for a new car with a whole new shape. Even car manufactures use the same “framework” across a range of their own brands. Although I’m not sure I agree with a Falcon and Jaguar having the same chassis.

You would tell your sales manager, “I understand this is important to you, and I think the sales fleet should be differentiated and that will give us a strong brand presence. So why don’t we get a custom colour, or even a pattern in the paintwork, and some branding with our logo.”

You can do a lot more customisation than this building a website from a pre-built theme. In fact you can make two different websites from the same theme and they will look far different than a Falcon and a Jaguar when compared.

Resistance from Designers to Premium themes

One of the recurring complaints about pre-made themes from designers is that they like to work on code they have written themselves. Pre-built themes actually take them longer to work on. Since good developers charge upwards of $100 per hour, that makes a pretty good business case, but let’s look a bit deeper.

What if your designer gets hit by a bus? Even if they used really good code you’re still left with a code that another designer has to learn. Or they need to completely re-build to their own standards and preferences. If your designer was prepared to build on a pre-built theme, then it would be much easier to replace them if needed. A pre-built theme was made for use by many developers and in almost all cases of “quality” themes it will be easy for a new designer to come in and take over someone’s custom theme.

I also reject that it takes them longer to work on a pre-built theme. Maybe if you decide to customise the theme beyond what it is meant for then I can see it taking longer, but that shouldn’t happen in the first place. Why does the design need to be so different from the solutions that are already available? Those solutions are already tried and tested by thousands of other website owners.

Or if you do hit that wall then you can try another theme that will meet your needs. It does take a bit of forward thinking, but if you use a popular framework like Genesis or Storefront and stick to some rules, then it shouldn’t be too hard to swap over to another child theme on those frameworks if needed.